Modern vehicles come equipped with vehicle telematics units that provide a wide variety of services at a vehicle. The vehicle telematics unit can provide vehicle occupants the ability to send and receive voice and/or data communications using cellular communications systems. But the vehicle telematics unit can also communicate using short-range wireless techniques. For example, the vehicle telematics unit can send and receive the voice/data communications through a Wi-Fi hotspot. Vehicle occupants frequently carry handheld smartphones or other similar devices capable of communicating using short-range wireless techniques. Vehicle occupants can then link their smartphone or other handheld wireless device with the vehicle such that the occupant can command the vehicle telematics unit through the smartphone or vice versa. In addition to the ability to communicate via cellular and short-range wireless protocols, the vehicle telematics unit can also provide automatic speech recognition (ASR) service in the vehicle. Using ASR technology and an in-vehicle microphone, vehicle occupants can verbally issue commands that can be interpreted by the vehicle, which then carries out an action in response to the command.
In one example of how the smartphone and the vehicle can interact while wirelessly linked, the vehicle occupant can verbally speak a command or nametag and the ASR system of the vehicle can interpret that nametag and dial a telephone number in response to that command. When interpreting the nametag, the ASR system can access the contacts stored at both the vehicle and the smartphone. However, some ASR systems generate results that ignore vehicle-stored nametags when searching both the vehicle and the smartphone contacts.